Bounty Hunter (9781101611975) (16 page)

“When do you suppose he'll be good enough to ride?” Cole asked.

“As I told you before when you asked that, it's been hard to say,” the doctor replied. “But I reckon he could tolerate ridin' in a saddle in a day or two.”

“Good,” Cole said.

“You gettin' tired of us, Mr. Cole?” Mary Margaret asked teasingly.

“Not at all. I'm just anxious to get these jokers to the courthouse and get on with things.”

“Hope you'll come back and see us,” she said, smiling. Cole figured that she really would miss the company. With the onset of winter, there would be fewer people passing though.

“I don't know whether to think of you as a fool or a saint to pay good money to have me putting this character back together just to turn him over to the law,” the doctor observed.

“In the first place, it's
his
money,” Cole said, referring to the $200 that had been in Gideon Porter's saddlebags. “In the second place, there's a lot more to justice than getting these two into the dock.”

The doctor just nodded.

Chapter 20

H
ANNAH
R
ANSDELL HAD BEEN BACK TO THE
G
ALLATIN
House a time or two after young Mr. Dawson Phillips, Jr., had gone back to Denver. She had not gone there to dine, or to reminisce about a meal with a handsome city fellow, but to scrounge newspapers.

Out-of-towners of the sort who would tend to frequent Gallatin City's leading hostelry would be the type who would read newspapers. Being the out-of-towners they were, they would arrive with out-of-town newspapers, including big city newspapers, and said papers would be discarded once read. Hannah was bent on learning all she could about the railroading plans of Mr. Frederick H. Billings.

By cross-referencing the information in the news articles, she ascertained that after several years of the Northern Pacific being in bankruptcy, Billings was pouring money into it, tracks were being laid, and they were headed for Gallatin City.

Though it was not customary for a daughter to know the nuances of her father's business dealings, it bothered Hannah that the banker's “assistant” had not known about a business deal that had so much potential.

Hannah had discerned the trace of bitterness in the voice of Dawson Phillips, Jr., when he spoke of this deal among the four partners, and in recollection, she sensed a trace of accusation when he spoke of it in light of the coming of the railroad. She knew that she was the type to overthink things, but the more she overthought this one, the more it seemed to warrant overthinking. The wheels in the back of her mind were churning like the driving wheels of a Northern Pacific locomotive.

Her father and his colleagues were certainly aware that the railroad would be coming and that they owned land across which it would come. What did it mean that her father and Mr. Stocker had inherited the interests of two men who had died violently in a crime that she considered unexplained?

Was her father somehow involved? He had not been present on that terrible night. Had this been by accident or by design? As much as she tried, she found it impossible not to think, much less
overthink
, the unthinkable.

The only way to clear her father from culpability in the unthinkable within the court of her own suspicions was to learn as much about the situation as she could.

When her father went out to lunch, she went to the old records, hoping to find out what her father had paid for the parcels of land north and east of Gallatin City. She occasionally had to look at the “old records” for one thing or another as part of her job, but when it involved going behind her father's back, it made her nervous.

She insisted to herself that she was doing nothing out of the ordinary. The old records, which were exactly that, and were
called
exactly that, were rarely consulted in day-to-day business, but
rarely
did not mean
never
.

Her heart jumped slightly when she found the first payment issued by Isham Ransdell for property in the areas in question.

The next day, Hannah stopped by at the land office, where there were copies of recorded deeds. The clerk knew her father, but one of her school friends worked there, so Hannah waited for the man to leave before she went in.

“Hello, Phoebe,” she said as she pushed open the door.

“Hannah . . . it's so good to see you . . . How have you been?”

Niceties having been concluded, Hannah explained to Phoebe that she needed to look at some old land records.

“Most of the public records are down at the county seat,” her friend explained. “But we do have copies that list owners, deed numbers, tract locations, and things like that.”

“That will do,” Hannah said. “Thank you so much.”

“Everything is filed by location,” Phoebe said. “Here's a map with all the grid numbers . . . Hey . . . we should get together for lunch sometime . . . since we're both a couple of working girls.”

“I'd like that,” Hannah said. It really
would
be nice.

Gradually, Hannah calculated the exact locations of the property acquired by the four men. By multiplying her father's payments by four, she also knew what they had paid for the property. What Hannah could not calculate was how much it might be worth.

*   *   *

“
G
OOD MORNING,
M
ISS
R
ANSDELL, IT'S A PLEASANT
surprise to see you here this morning,” Richard Wells said as she came into his dry goods store.

In her unfolding plan, Hannah needed to talk to a businessman, and a businessman outside her father's circle of friends and associates. As a competitor of John Blaine in the retail world of Gallatin City, Wells fit the bill. The Ransdells traditionally shopped at the Blaine store because of the connection, so Hannah's coming in here was a surprise. Her smile on a cold winter day made it the
pleasant
surprise that Wells described.

“Haven't seen you here in a while, figured you to be one to shop over at Blaine's.”

“I need some hat ribbon, Mr. Wells. I don't really care for what they have to offer.”

“Let me see what I can do for you,” Wells said, turning to a shelf. “Solid or floral?”

“Floral brightens up a winter day, doncha think?” Hannah asked rhetorically.

“Are you still working down at the bank?” Wells asked, making conversation.

“I sure am . . . Waiting for the right man to come along,” she answered, telling it as she imagined he would expect to hear it.

“I'd think you'd not have trouble finding him,” he smiled. “A man would be lucky.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wells.”

“And old Isham would be lucky too . . .” the shopkeeper continued, “lucky to have a son-in-law to take into the business.”

Hannah bristled, but the retort she considered appropriate was neither polite nor in furtherance of her purpose.

She smiled, selected a nice length of ribbon, which really
would
look nice on a hat, and put a coin on the counter.

As she was putting the ribbon into her bag, she allowed a newspaper to tumble out.

“Clumsy me,” she said. “Oh . . . did you see this? They're saying the railroad is coming.”

“I believe it is,” Wells said. “It has been long delayed, but old Fred Billings appears to be the man who will finally do the trick.”

“What will that mean?”

“It'll mean that folks from right here in Gallatin City can be walking the streets of the Twin Cities in three days or so . . . or Chicago a day beyond that . . . and travel there in
style
,” Wells said effusively. “It means that a merchant in Gallatin City, such as myself . . . such as Wells Mercantile . . . will be able to offer the ladies of Gallatin City the fashions of Chicago or even New York City . . . in a matter of a week or so after they have them in those places.”

“My goodness,” Hannah said, pretending not to have previously grasped such a concept. “What would it mean to property owners . . . landowners . . . in the area around Gallatin City?”

“Well, Miss Ransdell,” he began in a schoolmasterish way, “the rails are being brought east from Tacoma, but those coming west out of Dakota Territory are likely to arrive first. That will mean that landowners out east of town will have what a speculator would call ‘prime real estate,' if you understand what I'm saying.”

“I certainly do, Mr. Wells,” Hannah said. She did not have to pretend to be interested.

“The direction up toward Confederate Gulch and the gold fields, that would pretty much end up as prime real estate as well. There is much more advantage in those points of the compass than in the west, for instance. The rails coming from Tacoma will have to cross several ranges of mountains . . . the Cascades, the Bitterroots, the main thrust of the Rockies themselves . . . so they'll be a long time coming to Gallatin City.”

“If I was buying land . . .” Hannah began with a hypothetical tone.

“Then I'd say you were a year or so
too late
,” Wells chuckled with a raised eyebrow. “Those who bought before then will command a mighty pretty penny.”

“My goodness,” Hannah said. “I'll bet they will have doubled their money by the time the railroad gets here.”

“Doubled and doubled,” Wells said with a grin. “And doubled again after that . . .
at least
.”

“Making the land worth eight times what it was worth just a few years ago?” Hannah summarized.

“At least.” Wells nodded. “The railroad will need to lay down rails on ground, and it will have to get that ground from them who own it.”

*   *   *

I
F
H
ANNAH
R
ANSDELL HAD HOPED FOR HER RESEARCH TO
put her mind at ease about her father, then she was disappointed. By way of the crimes perpetrated at the Blaine home, the rapidly increasing value of her father's holdings had doubled overnight. And the night of that doubling brought to her mind the most nagging of suspicions, the one which she longed not to have in her mind. He
might have
been there on that dreadful night, in harm's way, but he was
not
.

As she walked back to the bank, thinking the unthinkable, she felt tears on her cheeks.

“Are you all right?” Isham Ransdell asked as his daughter came in the front door and went straight to her desk.

“Yes . . . Why do you ask?”

“Your eyes are red and likewise the tip of your nose.”

“It's cold today, Father,” she said dismissively without looking up from the papers she was shuffling on her desk.

The dialogue might have taken further turns had Edward J. Olson not walked through the door at that moment.

He went straight to Hannah's father's office.

Though the door was nearly closed, she did catch fragments of their conversation. The bounty hunter was mentioned, and she heard Olson use the phrase “dead or alive.”

Chapter 21

J
IMMY
G
OODE HAD BEEN MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE WHEN
he had been led, slumped over in his saddle, into the tiny former mining town of Copperopolis. When he rode out, he was more alive than dead—but just barely. As he watched Bladen Cole dig the stiff and frozen body of Enoch Porter out from beneath a pile of snow behind the city's jailhouse, he knew that this might have been his fate as well.

Goode's right arm was chained to his left just as it had been on the night of his escape, but today it was chained in that manner only as an anchor, because his right arm could never again be used for anything more. His hand was still there, and likewise a healed wrist, but he had no use of either.

They had waited out a storm and left before sunup on the second day following the doctor's pronouncement of Goode's being well enough for travel.

The storm having been more wind than snow, the ground was mostly bare as they climbed down out of the Little Belts and into more level country. It was, Cole thought, to keep with Natoya-I-nis'kim's analogy of his having taken on some spirit of the grizzly, like emerging from the hibernation of the snowy days spent in Copperopolis.

Descending out of the mountains, Cole hoped to pick up the headwaters of Sixteen Mile Creek and follow its canyon downstream to the Missouri. He had not chosen the main wagon road, which led down toward Diamond City, but a less used trail that promised a shorter distance to his final destination.

“You stupid pup,” Porter said assertively as Goode fought with one hand to keep his horse from snatching a bunch of grass, exposed above the snow along the trail.

“Back atcha, Gideon Porter,” Goode said defiantly.

In the days prior to Jimmy Goode's escape, the two prisoners had ridden mainly in silence—Gideon Porter brooding and angry, Goode silent and intimidated. After their days apart during Goode's moment of freedom and days of convalescence, the social dynamic had changed. For Goode, who had stared down death and still rode upright, Porter was no longer so imposing. He saw his onetime taskmaster as an increasingly disheveled man, his long-gone fancy boots replaced by a pair of simple moccasins that the bounty hunter had bought for him.

Cole chuckled to himself at hearing Porter's onetime lackey speaking his mind. All in all, though, he'd preferred the days of sullen silence to the incessant bickering that now filled the air.

“They're gonna hang us just for being part of this, ain't they?” Goode asked Porter.

“Shut up your mouth, Goode. I don't want you talkin' about that.”

“I know I ain't very smart, but they wouldn't have sent a bounty hunter after us unless they was fixin' to string us up.”

“I told you to shut up about that,” Porter demanded. “You're too damned stupid to be thinkin' about that.”

“Too stupid to be thinkin' about my
own neck
?”

“Ever since your mama dropped you on your head when you was a baby, you been tryin' to think,” Porter said angrily. “And you ain't very damn good at it or you'd know that they can't hang nobody for a killin' that was done by somebody else.”

“I hope that those friends of yours back in Gallatin City can . . .” Goode started to say.

“I told you to
shut up
!” Porter interrupted.

Cole wondered about Porter's friends in Gallatin City, and he wondered about them a lot. Long rides are an incubator for wondering, and this was a topic to which Cole's mind kept returning.

Cole had also done a lot of self-analytical wondering about his own motivations for wanting to deliver Porter and Goode alive, when delivering them dead would have been so much easier. Had he decided on the latter course, he would have been in and out of Gallatin City by now. It would be untrue to say that the idea of shooting both Porter and Goode had not passed through his mind on several occasions. He had certainly been handed opportunities with legitimate excuses.

He could have simply delivered three bodies, collected his money, and been long gone—yet there was something that made him crave justice and truth over expedience. It caused him some degree of fright to believe this to be symptomatic of some latent nobility within himself. Bladen Cole, noble? It could not be, he insisted.

Though his mind may have been seduced into reflecting, Bladen Cole's senses were on his prisoners and on their trail. Five senses processed the routine sights and sounds and so on, but it was Cole's
sixth
sense that made him turn in his saddle and look back toward the route over which they had come.

The first reaction was the satisfaction that's always the product of surveying the miles you have put behind you on a long trip. Second came the realization that those miles behind were not unoccupied. Roughly two of those miles farther back, on a hillside in the distance, there was a lone rider.

Cole could see little at this distance except a blue coat and a brown horse, neither of which were distinctive, and neither of which he recognized. The rider was coming deliberately, but not quickly. He was visible for only a few seconds before he dropped out of sight behind some trees in the foreground.

The most likely explanation was that he was just another traveler, making his way along the same trail that Cole had chosen. It may have been a less traveled road, but it was not an
untraveled
road.

Was it simply and innocently this, or was this lone rider bent on the same intended mischief that had cost the lives of the man in the big hat and his companion?

Was the man a lone rider or was he merely one part of a whole gang who had gotten wind of Cole's passing through Copperopolis with prisoners who had a price on their heads?

Cole weighed his options. He assumed, or at least hoped, that he had the advantage of the man not knowing that Cole had seen him. The bounty hunter knew that if he had been riding alone, it would have been easy to leave the trail and double back, screening himself in the thick timber, to get behind his pursuer. With two cantankerous and sporadically bickering charges, this would be more difficult, perhaps impossible. It could also tip Cole's hand as having become aware that he was being followed.

“Let's pick up the pace,” Cole demanded of Porter and Goode. “We have a lotta miles to cover.”

“What does it matter if we hang on Tuesday or Wednesday?” Goode asked.

“Shut up, you good-for-nothing Jimmy Goode,” Porter snarled. “I told you we ain't gonna hang.”

Cole looked back, hoping to see whoever followed them. The man he'd seen was not in a hurry, and perhaps by getting Porter and Goode to speed up, he could put more distance between them and the unknown pursuer or pursuers. He hurried them across a broad, treeless area and paused when they had reached the stand of ponderosa on the far side. He was curious to see how many riders entered the meadow.

To Cole's relief, only the single rider appeared, and he was more than two miles behind.

Through the waning hours of the day, Cole managed to keep far enough ahead so that the man didn't seem to know he'd been seen.

Cole made camp quickly as the sun went down, choosing a place beside the trail in a V-shaped canyon where a man attempting to flank the campsite in the dark would find it impossible without making noise slipping across the shale that littered the hillsides.

Having made a fire, the bounty hunter positioned himself high on this hillside, telling his prisoners that he was going to take a “look around.”

It did not take long afterward for the lone rider in the blue coat to emerge upon the scene of the camp. His eyes being fixed on the brightness of the fire, he would not readily notice Cole ensconced above in the shadows of late evening.

When viewed at close range in the firelight, the identity of the mystery man was revealed.

It was Sheriff Joshua Morgan.

He reined his horse to a halt and surveyed the scene briefly before he spoke.

“Looks like you got yourself in a considerably less comfortable state there than you had in my cell, Porter,” he said, looking at his former lodger chained to a ponderosa trunk.

“Damn you, Sheriff,” the man growled.

“Where's Cole?” Morgan asked, looking around as though he imagined the bounty hunter to be nearby.

“He ain't here,” Goode offered, after a long pause in which the question went unanswered by the moody Porter.

“I can see that,” the sheriff said. “That's why I was asking.”

“Heard him go up yonder hillside,” Goode explained. “Couldn't rightly see where on account of being chained here pointed t'other way.”

“Here,” Cole said from his perch.

“What are you doing way up there?” Morgan asked.

“I been watching a fellow trailing us all day, and I figured I wanted to be on high ground when he overtook us.”

“That feller would be me, I reckon.”

“Reckon so,” Cole confirmed. “I never figured on you being one to be following us.”

“Got to thinking,” Morgan said. “Got to thinking as I watched you ridin' out that you might . . . could use a hand with these two scamps.”

“Thank you for the thought, Sheriff, but I've come a long way on my own, and figure I can finish the job.”

“I didn't mean to question your abilities, Mr. Cole,” Morgan said apologetically. “I just wanted to offer my services. I hope you don't take offense.”

“No offense taken.”

“Good,” the sheriff said with an exaggerated sigh.

“Sorry to have you come all that way for nothing,” Cole said in a way that was not in the least apologetic.

“No need to apologize,” the sheriff said with a smile, trying to lighten the mood.

“You're welcome to camp with us tonight before you head back to Copperopolis,” Cole said, his offer framed not in the generosity of hospitality, but as a stern insistence that the sheriff clear out at first light.

*   *   *

C
OLE SLEPT FITFULLY AND AROSE BEFORE THE OTHERS
when the only indication of the nearness of morning was the position of the moon in the western sky. The others still slept, Porter and Goode chained awkwardly to separate trees, and Morgan on the ground near the fire. He snored relentlessly, his head of white hair bobbing in the moonlight with each breath.

Cole entertained thoughts of kicking him to try to quiet him but did not.

The bounty hunter had no reason to doubt the sheriff's intentions, other than that sixth sense which had caused him so much consternation the day before. Was this sixth sense, this disquieting streak of exaggerated distrustfulness, part of the curse of the grizzly's medicine?

“Coffee?” Cole asked as the sheriff rolled from his sleeping bag, a sputtering sound on his lips.

“It's the middle of the night,” the older man said, rubbing his eyes and scratching the several days' growth on his chin.

Cole gestured to the sliver of light on the eastern horizon.

Morgan just nodded.

“Coffee?” Cole repeated.

“Yeah . . . obliged.”

“I drank a lot of your coffee in Copperopolis,” Cole said, shrugging congenially.

“You're up early,” Morgan said, stating the obvious, as Cole handed him a tin cup.

“Got some miles to get behind us.”

“I was thinking . . .” Morgan began. “Ummm . . . I was thinking . . . about what we was talking about yesterday . . . about my offering to help you take these two in . . . and about your saying you didn't need no help.”

“Don't believe I do,” Cole said succinctly.

“Well, you had one of those two fellers get away from you once . . .”

“He ain't going anywhere again,” Cole interrupted, referencing Jimmy Goode's crippled state. He had not mentioned to the sheriff that
both
of the prisoners had made escape attempts.

“You never know,” Morgan said, shaking his head.

“Now, Sheriff, I
do
appreciate your offer . . . and I
greatly
appreciate your hospitality in letting me store one of my prisoners at your jail . . . but I paid you an agreed sum for that, and I consider our dealings to have come to a close.”

“Listen, young man,” Morgan said, playing the elder statesman card. “I have been in and around law enforcement and the care of desperados since long before you were saddling your own horse, and I know a situation where two gunhands are better than one when I see it.”

“I will certainly grant you the years of experience, Sheriff, but I am willfully determined that I'll be carrying on alone.”

Morgan sat for some time, thoughtfully staring off into the distance. At last he spoke.

“Is there any . . . ?”

“Nope.”

“What if I was to
ask
you politely to include me in this?” Morgan asked.

“No. I have gone through just about everything, including coming damned near being dinner for a grizzly, to get to this point, and I am not in a mood to share the reward . . . That's what it's about, isn't it? The reward?”